


Postcards from Rio

by Bond_Girl



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, F/M, Happy Ending, Pen Pals, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 14:46:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4023859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bond_Girl/pseuds/Bond_Girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two weeks later, Vanessa got a postcard. In a big, high-school dropout Archibald handwriting, it said: <i>don't you wish you were here</i>. </p><p>She didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postcards from Rio

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts for since 2011 and it's time for me to let it sail. Nate and Van will forever be my post-canon AU Gossip Girl flagship.
> 
> Thank you to Peri for the ending idea and for her beta work, in 2012 :) All the remaining mistakes are mine.

When everything was over, all the weddings and all the funerals, Nate went away. Into the sunset, quite literally. 

Still wearing the best man's tux, he stole his father's boat from the Nantucket harbor and sailed down south with nothing but a pack of cigarettes. He wanted to find out if there was the edge of the earth and see if he could fall off it for good. 

Vanessa first heard about his getaway when Nate started blogging, randomly, from cheap internet cafes and from borrowed phones. She was teaching English literature at a small Catalan university and she was deeply involved in a jealous, postmodern threesome with a physics postdoc and a revolutionary. Her life was more evolved than reading a travelogue of a trust fund baby without a plan or a moral compass. 

If Nate ended up with a faithful readership, it was definitely not because he was a good writer. 

He wrote about things like lying on the deck under the unfamiliar stars and the right way to tie a bowline on a bight. About foreign beer and leaving behind a bottle of sunscreen to a giant spider in Costa Rica. About the unbearable lightness of leaving great expectations behind. He didn't have a clever concept and he didn't care to spellcheck, but he was a Vanderbilt and he posted pictures of himself shirtless. 

By the time Nate was navigating Panama canal, he was getting more hits than Jesus. 

Vanessa would print out his posts and correct them with a red marker, or draw evil moustaches over his face because Nate's dimpled smile was too much to handle, even across the ocean and after two failed relationships between them. One fine morning when a girl tweeted a pic where Nate was not _the only one_ topless, Vanessa decided to exorcise him out of her life for good and mailed these corrected pages to Caracas in one big manila envelope. 

Two weeks later, she got a postcard. In a big, high-school dropout Archibald handwriting, it said: _don't you wish you were here_. 

She didn't. 

Her most promising class started on 'Moby Dick', and she was exploring tantric sex. 

In reply, Vanessa mailed him a copy of 'A Catcher in the Rye', highlighting the parts where it was obvious that Holden was misguided and spoiled and had nothing better to do than to wander around the city in search of himself, duh. 

His next postcard came from Fortaleza. It looked like it had gone around the world twice and its corners had been chewed on by an armadillo: _I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it_. 

It was good to know that Nate at least read the first Salinger chapter if he was quoting from it. 

It was good to know that Nate _read_.

She tore a few pages out of a dictionary, circled a few entries, and mailed them to Rio. These words were: _Futility_ , _Immaturity_ , and _Bullshit_. 

Nate promptly mailed back with _Serenity_ , _Epiphany_ , and _Discovery_.

Meanwhile, he was blogging about communing with the penguins in the Falklands and cryptic revelations how the farther away you went, the clearer you saw. Obviously, Nate was losing his mind in the dreary solitude of the Southern Atlantic, but instead of a wave of public concern, there were rumors of an Eat Pray Love kind of a book deal. 

Vanessa started to pack to kick some sense into him.

A hurricane named after one of Nate's more famous exes interfered with her rescue plan. The last time anyone saw Nate, he was headed around the continent and into the biggest storm of the year. There was no news of him for two weeks. 

Vanessa didn't even notice that her complicated relationships were becoming more complicated when, fueled by her sudden lack of interest in discussing Marx and quantum physics in the buff, the postdoc and the revolutionary began to sleep with each other. She was too obsessed with the lack of the Nate updates to care. 

Suddenly, Nate blogged from Concepcion about how he could never find his way from UES to Brooklyn on a good day, so imagine getting lost in the fog in the Strait of Magellan. And that he was headed north because he was ready to go home and because the local pot was weak. 

Nate's next postcard said: _missed me?_

When Nate's boat sailed into the San Francisco harbor, Vanessa stood there, squinting into the sun and trying hard to not be charmed by the postcard perfect view. 

"Seriously, V," Nate said as a hello. He easily went down on one knee on the deck like he was one with this fickle beast of a boat. Tanned and lean, Nate was made of sturdier things now. "I was expecting you in every port." Of course, he would have.

"Should have sent a postcard, N." She was light-headed, suddenly no longer sure what happened to the solid ground under her feet.

Nate leaned down to kiss her, salt and simple words on his lips. The boat briefly threatened to rock them apart, but Vanessa grabbed his shirt and held on. There had been enough of letting go on both sides of this kiss.

Now that everything was over, anything could happen.


End file.
